@greenthinker, well I don’t know about the U.S but we just had our national census in 2011 in Australia. The results indicate that ‘non religion’ has jumped to over 30% of the population since 2006. Maybe the church’s are loosing their strong hold giving way for people to seek their own truth and meaning in life, thus causing a domino affect ‘while I’m questioning religion might as well question the government to!’

@greenthinker, thinking about it I would have to say that it probably has something to do with StumbleUpon and the fact that highexistence had enough viewer to send it relatively high on google’s search list.

I feel like the people who really cling to HE are probably going to tell some of their friends, who they think will also be interested, and that chain continues. Then you have the SU advertising, and we all know that a large portion of people who have come to this site have mentioned SU as the reason. Mix that with the fact that someone searching for certain things, like maybe a topic that is mentioned a lot here but not so much in other corners of the internet.

I looked up “How Do You Lucid Dream” and HE was on the 3rd page of results. It’s true that not many people care to venture past the first page, but imagine their search being a little more specific, say “deep inspiring music.” That search shows an HE subpage on the very FIRST Google search return.

I attribute the surge to a combo of exponential growth in general, and the 3.0 redesign. The images/quotes/videos really brought a new dimension to the site. Some individual images have hundreds of thousands of views.

I feel like it’s similar to the 2% 15% 50% remaining 50% theory. When new things come around, the first two percent are innovators, the next 15 early adapters, the next up to the first 50% just average people. Nothing grows significantly until it reaches past 2%. I feel like as we got over 10,000 (I’ve been here since ~4500 members, I just didnt make an account till about 10k) site improvements did come around, but we hit the necessary tipping point for He to start growing fast enough to attract significant attention

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Kidd(1,058)just a Kidd. If you want to know more, fee...(@kidd)5 years, 6 months ago ago

I think Stumble Upon is a big part of it. I stumbled onto HE four or five times before joining up–it was at about 14,000 members, then.

I think it’s got a lot to do with StumbleUpon (I discovered this through StumbleUpon myself), and the fact that a lot of the people on this site are more or less at the age where people go to college, and school has just started back in session. A lot of people probably find it on StumbleUpon during downtime surfing the net at school….that’s my guess anyway.

@greenthinker, If I am to be considered the average, it is because life on the interwebs has become monotonous. We click on Reddit, then we click facebook, then we click 4chan, then we click local news. EIGHT TIMES AN HOUR. Convenience of information will ultimately destroy our ability to access it.

I think that behavior can be categorized, from simple introversion and extroversion to very minuscule details numbering in the thousands. Now, in that thought, there is sometimes places where different personalities behave the same way (where people have the same interests, grew up in the same environment, etc.). Now, through the internet, there are literally 1-2 billion people who have access to the largest unification of culture and knowledge in history. A person can wonder about some fact, like I just did about how many people actually have internet access, type in words with flicks of their fingers into some machine, connecting to a server farm on the other side of the world and receive the location of where to find that information in half a second. I think in that one and a half billion people, there are at least several hundred thousand that are looking for the same information, relevant or not, and find different ways to compile that information. Whether it be fashion tips from Us magazine or maybe instructions on how to build a robot with $20 equipment or, here, opinions on whatever you’re interested in. The point is, I think there is a certain percentage of like minded people that just happened to find this site recently. Sorry.

The consciousness of this planet is on the rise…I can feel it and so can many others. The thirst for knowledge and most importantly, the truth, is what we want…people are fed up with the greed, the wars, dogmatic religions, mudslinging politics, and the suppression of knowledge. If you are here, then you are a seeker of the truth.

Let’s be real. I remember when it was 2.0 and we were at 9,000 members and it seemed like we were inching along waiting for 10,000 to hit so we could launch 3.0. Then, all of a sudden, 3.0 launches and the exponential growth emerges and HE has MORE THAN DOUBLED since.

You know, I bet is we tried, we could get a hastag to trend on Twitter if we all agreed to post something on our own Twitter accounts at a certain time (not that such an act would benefit the site in any way other than adding people into the mix…)

the snowball effect!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!